I got to visit Japan for vacation and there were so many moments where I felt like I was just in a familiar place because I had seen it so many times before in media.
I assume people feel the same way when they visit places like Los Angeles, Toronto, etc. Places we’re all familiar with in some capacity even though we haven’t been there. It’s really fun to go out and explore the mundanity of places in person.
If anyone is wondering: yes, people use real photos as a reference for their background art. In anime/ manga, they’ll often trace and then use watercolor/ digital art/ ink.
Berserk has a whole host of real-world inspirations that are really neat. Here’s an example:
Some of the lower budget studios will just straight up Rotoscope an image and then draw their characters in afterwards. Food is the biggest offender. Which is fair for producing an artwork of quality with limited resources, I suppose.
The thing about food looking hyper-realistic is an artifact of a studio that got ridiculed for animating it particularly badly. Ever since then, it has been a meme to make food overly detailed.
The main difference is that there isn’t someone walking onto the train in the real photo. This proves, as we already assumed, no one actually lives in japan. It’s just a bunch of automated trains driving around for fun
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